A UK SEO

If you’ve checked the BBC news site this morning you’ll notice a new design, the navigation has jumped to the top, new headings and a new side bar. Another little change is the URL structure of the news articles.  Old URL’s used to be locaed on the sub domain and use the folder path the article appears in e.g.

• news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10607410.stm

However the new URL’s use the main www. subdomain and no folder path.

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10607410

As we all know if you change your URL’s you need to implement 301 re-directs from the old URL’s to the new URL’s. And the BBC have it’s just they are all temporary 302 redirects (Click the picture below to see results from httpfox)

Could be a lot of PR lost if the re-directs stay as 302.

Not sure why I picked this article???

Edit: This is not effecting older articles where the URL remains the same, seems to be recent articles.

Bad Tasting Orange Lolly from Bing today who were handing out treats on Deansgate, we took a box.

Bad Tasting Orange Lolly

As you may know I’m a massive Blackpool FC fan, this picture has been doing the rounds of the new shirt sponsor. It’s none other than Bing. We know they have a massive budget for marketing in the UK, you just need to watch TV for 10 mins and you’ll catch a TV ad.

Good move by Bing?

Noticed that google are testing the search results without the underline of the link. Currently this is on natural and paid listings in Germany. But seems that the styling of the line height is out on some of the listings.

Malcolm Coles posted about the new featured in Google.com where suggested brands are displayed at the top of the results. Each brand then links to a new search with the brand added to the original search.

Here are some interesting examples.

Smartphones – No sign of the iPhone

Game Consoles – No XBox

Condoms – Yes even for them

Laptops – At Last apple shows

Learnings from this,

1. Become a brand – easier said than done
2. If your an online retailer look to improve your brand phrase e.g. sony TV’s, sony Laptops, sony camera, as the searches should increase if they are being displayed as a suggested search.

Great post on getting rid of PHPSESSID problems, including a script to re-direct indexed URL’s.

www.frozenminds.com/disable-sessionid.html

Last night I attended my first Manchester WordPress User Group Meeting (MWUG). Hosted at the MadLab in the Northern Quarter the group is a great way to learn a little more about WordPress. Below is a quick review of two points discussed with some useful references.

credit – Eric M Martin

1. Post Types

At the moment in the WordPress back end you have the option to add a new post or a new page. What post types allows you to do is add new types of posts, so add a new “movie”, “person” etc rather than adding a new post. This could be very useful if your blog / site is used as a CMS as you have different areas where new content needs adding e.g. a football team site could have several post types – player, match reports, fixtures, ticket information per match etc.

You can accomplish this already by using pages and assign them a different template, but this requires the creation of template files in your theme. Post types should allow you to create the majority from the back end.

The added benefit is that the new post type is added to the menu in the back end which is great for keeping things simple for non techy users.

Mike Little went over an example using some sample code from http://wpengineer.com/impressions-of-custom-post-type/, head over there to read more about post types. This will change the way you create CMS sites using WordPress.

2. Menus

Currently if you want to create a menu thats a mix of posts, categories, has children, but doesn’t show a particular page you would need to use wp_list_pages with various arguments and add the code to your theme. Menus allows the building of menus in the back end add and then the ability to display your menu using widgets.

This system has been taken from Woo Themes (this site runs on) and will be added into WordPress 3.0, you can get it now if you use the subversion access. Head over to http://wordpress.org/development/2010/02/menus-merge-patch-sprint/ for more information on menus in WordPress 3.0.

Get Involved

There was lots more discussed in the evening including a new WordPress driven site from Mike. If you want to get involved head over to the new MWUG blog and the MWUG Google Group.

Google today rolled out the rest of the UK to Google streetview. After a quick browse of old houses and a few interesting places I came across this strange colour / black and white picture which is just outside of my flat.

Just plain strange.

flavors.me is a site I came across the other day. The concept is pretty simple, it’s a centralised page where you can pull together your online content. From twitter, flickr, rss, facebook it’s all pulled into one page which you create in around 5 minutes.

You can upgrade for $20 to get stats and use your own custom domain.

Head over to my http://flavors.me/johnpcampbell1985 to check out my page.

flavors.me could be useful for a centralised page for a brand wanting to link to their various activity online.

This is an attempt at a weekly blog to round up some of the best, worst, funniest of the week. Considering I spend 50 hours a week on the net I should cone up with something half decent.

Song

Nice rendition of Katy Perry’s Hot and Cold.

Site
UK explorations site with some great pictures http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/

App

Imdb in an app should help settle some arguments, questions and pub quiz movie rounds